Courses Offered in Spring 2024 (112AY 2S)

Prerequisites or Required Background

1. Students of the Institute of Music must have completed Music Theory I, or have passed the music theory placement test administered at the beginning of the previous semester.
2. Non-Institute of Music students must have completed Music Theory I in the previous semester before continuing to Music Theory II.

Course Overview and Objectives

This course has two objectives:

1. To strengthen the integrated musical and intellectual abilities of incoming students whose background in harmony and musical form may be relatively weak, so that they may better adapt to other courses in the Institute of Music.
2. To prepare students for the realization of a fully developed musical experience—one that integrates theory, practice, and creation.

This course is divided into two parts:

The first part concerns the basic theory of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tonality, including harmony and analysis. Students will be guided to focus on voice-leading and to analyze tonal music from the perspectives of structure and prolongation. The goal is for students to stop viewing tonal music as a series of isolated chordal connections, and instead to investigate its meaning and function, understanding the whole as an organic unity.

The second part concerns style writing. It highlights and provides experience with Western art music and some of its major concepts, using these concepts as a basis for creative realization. These concepts include:

1. Ways of presenting thematic material, such as sentence, period, and others.
2. The idea as the embodiment of totality and its discourse.
3. The indispensable functional roles of structural events in sonata form, including thematic statement, development, contrast, conclusion, and others.
4. Figuration, the prolongation of a single chord, and the prolongation of structural harmonic progressions.
5. Figuration as sign, as style, and as topic.
6. The concepts and techniques of developing variation.

This graduate course introduces research methods, as well as the strategies and the “language” of writing about music to performance majors. We start with a brief review of the basics of research venues, tools, and crucial issues in and ethics of academic writing. We continue with a series of sample writings hand in hand with these principles. We will see how the authors focus on different aspects of perspectives in their discussion of music and how they develop and sharpen their arguments.

The aim of this course is to offer graduate music majors necessary tools and directions to engage in an intelligent discussion of their repertory, skills that they may apply to their term projects, thesis writing, and lecture recitals. We will have two invited music scholars coming to discuss the ways that they phrase they theories arguments. The selected sample writings will enable us to see the variety of ways that an author may use to approach a music work.
In addition to our weekly discussion, short assignments, and quiz(zes), each student will function as a discussion leader in a class session; sign-up sheet will be distributed by week 4. At the end of the term, the class will be divided into several groups. Each group will present a chosen article or book chapter, discussing how the author’s approach to music and the pros and cons of this writing relate to the principles and basics that we have discussed earlier in the semester.

Prerequisites or Required Background

The course is open to Institute of Music students majoring in string instruments, with preference given to those specializing in violin. Other students majoring in string instruments are also eligible to enroll.

Course Overview and Objectives

Each week, students will take turns performing in groups, while the teacher and other students provide feedback and share their experiences through observation and discussion. This aims to enhance practical performance skills, address technical and pedagogical challenges, and ensure that students have a strong foundation in teaching methods for their future careers in music performance or teaching.

Prerequisites or Required Background

There are no prerequisites. However, students should possess intermediate knowledge, experience, and ability in music theory. Non-Institute of Music students should contact the instructor by email in advance for consultation.

Course Overview and Objectives

Practical Arranging is an applied course that integrates students’ knowledge of music theory and musical experience, including harmony, counterpoint, musical form, instrumentation, and orchestration. Through the practical and comprehensive application of these areas, combined with individual creativity and taste, the course aims to provide practical training in music arranging.

Prerequisites or Required Background

Students must possess advanced performance ability on their major instrument, as well as collaborative ensemble skills.

Students must pass the proficiency examination and confirm their own chamber music ensemble.

Non-Institute of Music students who wish to take chamber music must first have a selected repertoire and ensemble members, and may enroll only after passing the audition.

Course Overview and Objectives

Students are divided into groups according to instrument type, with instruction provided by several instructors arranged by the Institute of Music.

課程概述與目標：This course is designed for music majors at graduate level. Prior knowledge of the repertory, styles, and genres of music is required. English will be primary language for instruction; Mandarin will be incorporated for the explanation of more complex ideas and during the discussion between the instructor and the students. We focus on a selection of popular topics in the scholarship of mid-late 18th-century music, often known as Classic music. Despite the brevity of this period in music history, its association with culture and politics is as extremely important. Our aim is to explore in depth how and to what extent major historical events, important movements and trends, and the issues that appealed to the intellectual, related to the development music in this era.

We will spend the first third of the semester on the idea of rationality, a key concept in the Enlightenment, including how it was contested in music and drama. We continue with the impact of French Revolution on the work by Cherubini, a crucial figure at the time and who is often overshadowed in history by the more well-known composers based in Vienna, namely, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. W8-12 is devoted to the reading of Classic style, the complex definition of nature in relationship to the castrato, and the opera buffa in the context of Vienna. Whereas specific composers and works stand out more obviously, our focus will be the ways in which the cultural contexts associated to and left an impact on the development of these figures and works.

We will conclude with a selection of some of the most popular music treatises and pedagogical manuals that circulated in this era and are still much studied today. Created by the major musicians and pedagogues of the time, these sources reveal the discussion of music from on a technical level and the reasoning of playing these instruments in certain ways. These music “DIY”s also suggest how, by this time, the correct execution of these instruments was considered a knowledge worth sharing with a larger and increasingly literate public.

教科書（請註明書名、作者、出版社、出版年等資訊）：

The readings for each week are either posted on the course website or can be accessed on the university library’s collection of electronic resources (for example, JSTOR). Readings that provide some background information related to each week’s topic will come from the following sources: Daniel Heartz, Music in the Age of Enlightenment, The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music (2009), and Oliver Strunk, ed., Source Readings in Music History.

Course Overview and Objectives

The goal of “Analysis of Twentieth-Century Music” is to help students understand the diverse styles of twentieth-century Western music and become familiar with twentieth-century music theory and analytical techniques.

This course places particular emphasis on music from the first half of the twentieth century, before 1945. The overall course design aims to cultivate students’ sensitivity to twentieth-century music, enable them to analyze its various styles and techniques, reflect on the purpose of analysis, and learn how to produce meaningful analytical interpretations.

Accordingly, this course in music analysis has two objectives:

1. To observe and approach the major material dimensions within the structure of twentieth-century music.
2. To practice analytical methods and techniques for twentieth-century music.

The first objective primarily helps students correctly identify the main materials and structures used in a twentieth-century musical work. The second objective then enables students, through practical exercises, to learn different analytical methods and apply them appropriately to the analysis of twentieth-century works.

The course content is divided into five units:

1. Impressionist music and Stravinsky before 1920.
2. Neoclassicism.
3. The music of Bartók.
4. Serial Music I, 1920–1945, with emphasis on basic set theory.
5. Serial Music II, with emphasis on basic twelve-tone music.

The topics of this seminar include literature reading, music analysis, and performance practice. Through multiple methods the students will be able to research the performance of music styles from the 16th to 18th centuries and explore the art of Authentic Performance. 

Course Overview and Objectives

This course is conducted in workshop format and organizes a range of topics related to contemporary music composition. Approaching these topics from different perspectives, the course helps students learn compositional techniques in contemporary music. These topics include: 1. the design of pitch materials, 2. the exploration of timbre, 3. changes in texture and layers, and 4. the design of space and layers, among others.

The course begins with the developmental logic of sound, and gradually incorporates writing exercises centered on pitch, timbre, texture, and space. Through this process, each topic is explored systematically. The course aims to guide students in learning important compositional techniques developed since the twentieth century from a practical perspective, while also encouraging them to bring forward ideas encountered during their creative practice for discussion.

Semester Assignments, Examinations, and Assessment

1. Attendance is required at every Colloquium. Students who need to take leave do not need to complete a make-up viewing for the first absence. For the second absence, students must complete the make-up viewing at the time announced by the teaching assistant and submit a reflection report of at least 800 Chinese characters. The report will be reviewed and evaluated after discussion at the Institute Affairs Meeting. Students who take leave three times or more will be considered to have failed the course for that semester.
2. Make-up audiovisual recordings will be played together during the Colloquium period at the end of the semester. Students who are absent, do not watch the audiovisual recording, or fail to submit the reflection report will be considered to have failed the course. Students are responsible for fulfilling these requirements.
3. Two to three students will be assigned as questioners for each Colloquium. Please pay attention to the assignment.
4. Food and drinks are prohibited in the Colloquium Space. Food may be placed on the long table outside the classroom. Please remember to take it with you when you leave.
5. The use of electronic devices is prohibited during class.
6. Please return your chair to its original position before leaving.

Course Overview and Objectives

This course is conducted in the form of special topics, selecting composers for the study of their styles and compositional techniques. This semester uses selected works by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) and Kaija Saariaho (1952–2023) as research materials, exploring their styles and techniques while guiding students to apply these ideas to composition and performance interpretation.

The course includes processes such as listening, score reading, observation, discussion, hypothesis, and verification. Some course content will also include video interviews with composers and readings of related articles. The goal is to guide students in understanding representative composers from different periods and styles through multifaceted observation and discussion of their works, and to further analyze their aesthetic concepts and practical technical applications in composition.

Students who have previously taken “Special Topics in Composers: Ligeti & Crumb” in the second semester of the 2022 Academic Year may still take this course.

Course Overview and Objectives

This is a foundational course in recording and mixing. Its applications are broad: it may serve as a course that helps performers document their own performances, up to chamber music works for five performers, or complete musical productions through separate multitrack recording sessions. The course emphasizes learning and becoming familiar with audio equipment and studio production techniques.

The course is divided into three main learning stages:

1. Understanding and becoming familiar with sound systems and DAWs.
2. Practical recording work with different instruments.
3. Effects processing, mixing, and final production.